It is a great pleasure to be here at this conference, with this very - PDF document

It is a great pleasure to be here at this conference, with this very vibrant group. Coming from BC, I do want to acknowledge the welcome to the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Tsuu T’ina people. It’s also a wonderful privilege to be here at the invitation of the Miistakis Institute, at the centre of the Y2Y initiative. As a coastal person, I have no real connection with the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor, but I see the strong resonances with what I can feel strongly about, namely B2B (Baja to Bering) or C2C (Chile to Chukchi). All of these campaigns recognize the need to look in a holistic way at integrated ecosystems, whether mountain or marine. The Miistakis Institute itself, as a non ‐ profit corporation within a post ‐ secondary organization, represents innovative outreach toward realization of the new third mission of the university and the new social contract with the academy. That general challenge of integration and co ‐ creation with academic expertise, professional social inquiry, local observation, experience within the particularities of place, traditional knowledge and First Nations culture is really the core theme underlying my comments today. But, referring to the Katherine Maltwood image on the left of the slide, I have to note that this general theme has been approached in many ways in many cultural traditions. 1

Just to set a bit of a framework, I’m going to begin by suggesting a very general context, mostly to help in clarifying concepts or illustrating the way I’ll be using the language. I’ve labelled this conceptual framework the staircase to sustainability, but, as I just noted, more artistically one might refer to the path to enlightenment, as in the image on the previous slide, drawn from the Maltwood Collection at UVIC. Then will move on concretely to describe Ocean Networks Canada very briefly, and within that to outline the instrument we call Digital Fishers. I’ll try to suggest ways to set the Digital Fishers (DF) work in the context of my little staircase. That context suggests the need to consider what some people might mean by ‘civic science’, and then to ask how one might consider trying to build DF toward that sort of ‘civic science’ and ultimately some form of web ‐ enabled dialogic democracy. Finally, if there is time to reflect on some of the more general questions arising from this discussion, we might be able to suggest some conclusions. 2

Opening Stanza from Choruses from "The Rock” The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit. O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust. T. S. Eliot (1888 ‐ 1965), “What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?” 3

Beginning in the 1980s (though anticipated by the poet T. S. Eliot in the 1930s), and expanded a bit in the 1990’s, there has been discussion of the so ‐ called DIKW scheme in knowledge management—building from data and information through knowledge to wisdom. A staircase version was introduced by Fred Roots, a distinguished Canadian ecologist whom many of you will know. I’ve elaborated it substantially here. A growing range of tools has been developing to carry out the transitions needed at each step of this staircase. In the Digital Fishers initiative I will sketch in a moment, we try to capture significant stages of the evolution in the slogan “Data from the Deep; Knowledge from the Crowd; Wisdom from the Process”. We can trace the steps up the staircase in a straightforward way, starting from the bottom, observing the increasing importance of context. (If we were thinking about the old policy cycle, we might think of the descent back down the back of the staircase, from new covenants back down to local action in particular places, but that’s outside today’s story.) Many current topics and controversies are embedded in this diagram. Indeed there is a whole academic course of study, or several. Here I’d like just to emphasize the roles of science ‐ oriented crowdsourcing or citizen science in the early steps, embracing participation in knowledge ‐ building processes, as distinct from the role of civic science oriented to improved, more legitimate policy built on interpretation of that scientific evidence and knowledge at the later stages. (Of course, no such ‘stages’ images are ever accurate—all these processes are fuzzy, clumsy, iterated in a wide range of disorderly dynamics—but I hope the imagery is helpful for discussion purposes.) 4

Ocean Networks Canada (another non ‐ profit corporation inside a university) operates the world ‐ leading NEPTUNE and VENUS cabled ocean observatories for the advancement of science and the welfare of all the creatures of the Earth. These observatories consist of instrument clusters placed on the seafloor, connected by fibre optic cable. They collect data on physical, chemical, biological, and geological aspects of the ocean over long time periods, broadcasting continuously 365 days per year. The NEPTUNE regional observatory and VENUS coastal observatory provide unique scientific and technical capabilities that permit researchers to operate instruments remotely and receive data at their home laboratories anywhere on the globe in real time. The 800 ‐ km NEPTUNE observatory off the West Coast of Vancouver Island and the nearly 50 ‐ km VENUS coastal observatory in the Salish Sea—which together make up the Ocean Networks Canada Observatory—stream live data from instruments at key sites off coastal BC via the Internet to scientists, policy ‐ makers, educators and the public around the world. In addition to the instruments that capture quantified observations, these instrument clusters also include both hydrophones and video cameras. Even though the cameras are operated only 5 minutes every hour—in order to avoid perturbing or contaminating the permanently dark seafloor environment—five Neptune Canada cameras operate every day through the years, and thus generate a veritable firehose of visual images. A rough estimate is that 5 minutes every hour accumulates to over 700 hours of video footage per camera per year. Five cameras generate 3500 hours, or 100 working weeks, or two full years of work just to view. 5

This massive body of video data is not currently amenable to machine processing, and in the absence of that alternative this volume of video data will eventually overwhelm the capacities of the global scientific community. Just as there are not enough scientists or students in the world to examine all the astronomical images flowing from growing arrays of marvelous new telescopes, there are not enough to handle the firehose of video imagery from ONC. And these are continuous video clips, not just single images—orders of magnitude more challenging. So the goal of the Digital Fishers project is to explore a crowdsourcing option that harnesses the Internet ‐ based volunteer efforts of a large number of non ‐ expert participants as a first ‐ pass alternative to machine processing or analysis by experts. DF is a result of a joint project of NEPTUNE Canada (NC) and the University of Victoria Centre for Global Studies (CFGS). Digital Fishers attempts to draw in anonymous contributors to tag and enrich the databases storing ONC’s flood of video data from under the sea, and thus improve the resulting foundation of scientific evidence to support decisions. These contributors may be motivated by nothing more than the entertainment value of the activity. The hope, however, is that they will get seriously drawn into the enterprise of improving the science itself, as is happening with the astonishingly successful Galaxy Zoo and other projects under the umbrella of the Zooniverse initiative founded by the Citizen Science Alliance. In addition to providing the basic functionality of easily viewing and annotating NC video data, the DF interface faces a second challenge ‐ that of persuading volunteer participants to engage with the DF process across multiple iterations and long time periods. We do not yet have sufficient experience with DF or gamification to be confident that we can drive enough traffic to the site to assure statistically reliable annotations and enhancement of the database. But we are hopeful, based on the success of other such initiatives. 6

Along with other data collected by Ocean Networks Canada, the Digital Fisher annotations are recorded in their data management and archive facilities at the University of Victoria. Once registered as a user, anyone can login anytime to observe/download the data in real time. All you need is an Internet connection. 7